‘If you want peace, prepare for war?’
Last week, North Korea did something outrageous….again. Its border guards shot a South Korean civilian and burned his body. It seems the man was trying to defect, and was apprehended while floating in the water. Fearful of Coronavirus contagion, the soldiers took no chances. A few days later, bizarrely, Kin Jong-un sent an apology to the president of South Korea. Such antics are a now familiar part of the still officially un-ended Korean War, a suspension that, as I live near the DMZ, I am often reminded of.
On the website ‘Lima Charlie’, which, as it states, ‘provides global news, featuring insight & analysis by military veterans and intelligence professionals Worldwide’, the author of an essay, John Sjoholm, summarizes the conventional ‘hawkish’ wisdom concerning war by quoting the famous maxim ‘Si vis pacem, parabellum.’ If you want peace, prepare for war. He writes:
This age-old adage formulated some 1,600 years ago by the famed Roman General Flavius Vegetius Renatus has not only withstood the winds of time, but its prescience has been continually reaffirmed by Western history
The axiom’s meaning, that a strong defense is required to ensure lasting peace, is a simple but true insight that has been oft reflected upon since Flavius first uttered it. It has, however, represented yet another chasm between the mindset of military strategists, their political masters, the needs of the defender and the potential victim. In the civilian political world the axiom is frequently denounced as an excuse for needless aggression. Warmongering by frightful military leaders.[1]
On the face of it, the current situation on the Korean peninsula seems to be excellent proof of this principal: ‘a strong defense is required to ensure lasting peace’. The DMZ, which is just 40 kilometers from Seoul along one stretch, and near to which I live, is surely an exemplary manifestation of a successful ‘strong defense’. Isn’t it largely thanks to the DMZ’s forbidding existence, cutting the peninsula decisively into two regions, that has ensured that no war has broken out here since 1953?
True, war has been avoided. But the current state of so-called ‘peace’ on the Korean peninsula has come at a high price. There may have been no armed conflict since 1953, but the result of a situation in which ‘peace’ is guaranteed by the perpetual preparation for ‘war’ has been the creation of militarized surveillance societies on both sides of the DMZ. This is obviously the case in North Korea, but who can deny that South Korea is also constrained in far-reaching ways - social, economic, political, cultural - by the necessity of its perpetual preparedness for war?
The deep insinuation of the values of war into civil society is something that the author of the article on ‘Lima Charlie’ fails to consider, and this omission throws into question the true wisdom of Flavius’ maxim in the context of contemporary society. From the vantage point of today, in fact, it looks as if the maxim is an error in reasoning based on the rigidly binary thinking into which words lure us. The binary ‘war/peace’ is posited as if it marks mutually exclusive opposites states that exist in the real world. Closer to the truth, however, is that the social conditions described by the words ‘war’ and ‘peace’ lie on a continuum along which at some point they blend imperceptibly one into the other. The words are abstractions which do not reflect the true complexities of lived reality.
In a current exhibition about the Korean War and contemporary war in general at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul called ‘Unflattening’ (June 25 - September 20), a wall text corrects Flavius’ maxim by scoring through the word ‘bellum/war’ and writing instead ‘Si vis pacem. Para pacem’ – ‘If you want peace, prepare for peace.’ The implicit argument behind this new vantage point is that war, as the writer on the website ‘Lima Charlie’ put it, is always ‘needless aggression’ and inherently ’warmongering’. How, indeed, can there ever be real ‘peace’ when a society is preparing for ‘war’?
But it is also evident that different societies will never understand the word ‘peace’ in the same way. This is very obviously the case in relation to North and South Korea. Furthermore, the meaning of the word ‘peace’ derives from its status as the obverse of the word ‘war’. ‘Peace’ is not a social condition that can be realized apart from ‘war’. War and peace exist on a continuum. In fact, in the end the only kind of ‘peace’ that is spoken of here must be the ‘eternal peace’ of the grave.
Who can deny that violence lies at the very foundations of social behaviour? The pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus famously declared: “War is the father of all things.” Several centuries later, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote:
War essential. It is vain rhapsodizing and sentimentality to continue to expect much (even more, to expect a very great deal) from mankind, once it has learned not to wage war. For the time being, we know of no other means to imbue exhausted peoples, as strongly and surely as every great war does, with that raw energy of the battleground, that deep impersonal hatred, that murderous coldbloodedness with a good conscience, that communal, organized ardor in destroying the enemy, that proud indifference to great losses, to one’s own existence and to that of one’s friends, that muted, earthquakelike convulsion of the soul.[2]
But today, the whole nature of warfare has been radically transformed, and is very different from war as envisaged by Heraclitus and Nietzsche. Paul Virilio outlines the transition from the old-style war fought in Korea between 1950 and 1953, to the wars of today and tomorrow.[3] Over the centuries, war has evolved from obstruction, to destruction, to communication. From castles (obstructive war), to artillery (destructive war), to technologies of information control (the war of the ‘information bomb’ and of weapon-systems of elusive interactivity). In 1983, Virilio termed contemporary war ‘Pure War’, which is characterised above all by speed, but when he published a new edition of his book by 2007 he argued that war had morphed into ‘Impure War’ or ‘Infowar’. Contemporary warfare is asymmetric and transpolitical. It inaugurates a dangerous new era of belligerent ‘metropolitics’ in which the focus of aggression is the city, and the camouflage of choice a sweatshirt, jeans and backpack.
The Korean War was a war of bad old-fashioned ‘destruction’, which then froze into a war of ‘obstruction’. The current situation on the Korean peninsula seemingly perpetuates war in this sense – as ‘obstruction’. The DMZ anachronistically reinstates the first, primitive, stage of warfare. “Pure War is still around,” Virilio wrote: “it’s still possible to press the button and send out missiles – Korea can do it, Iran can do it, and so can others; but in reality the real displacement of strategy is in this fusion between hyper-terrorist civil war and international war, to the point that they’re indistinguishable.” [4] Less obvious is the fact that it is actually the third stage of warfare as described by Virilio – communication - which now prevails on the Korean peninsula.North Korea manufactures a steady stream of hot belligerent rhetoric concerning combat readiness, while actual, real, destructive, war has not occurred since 1953. It can be argued that the third stage of war is therefore the dominant one, and that the Korean War, which never ended with a peace treaty, is a pioneer in the waging of war as communication. This is perhaps something that the artists in the MMCA exhibition help to make evident.
Today, as the great American historian and activist Howard Zinn wrote, as a matter of survival we must somehow learn to ‘achieve justice, with struggle, but without war.’[5] But how is this possible now that there has been a ‘fusion of hyper-terrorist war and international war’? We are living in an era when war has become all pervasive and unprecedentedly dangerous, and yet continues to escalate to extremes.
REFERENCES
[1] John Sjoholm, ‘Europa – Si vis pacem, para bellum (If you want peace, prepare for war)’, https://limacharlienews.com/europe/europa-si-vis-pacem-para-bellum/
2] Friedrich Nietzsche. Human, All Too Human, Section Eight: A Look At The State - Aphorism # 477
[3] Paul Virilio. Pure War. Translated by Mark Polizzotti and Brian O’Keeffe. New York: Semiotext(e). New Edition, 2007. P. 199
[4] Paul Virilio, Pure War. New Edition. P. 12-13.
[5] Howard Zinn, ‘Just and Unjust War’, in The Zin Reader. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2009. P. 279